Professor Jenny Cheshire is completing her tenure in December 2019 as Editor of Language in Society (LiS). Cambridge University Press is now inviting applications for the position of Editor. A team of two Co-Editors will also be considered. Final appointment decisions will be made by the Syndicate of Cambridge University Press.

The deadline for applications is February 1, 2018.

Language in Society is an international journal of sociolinguistics concerned with language and discourse as aspects of social life. The journal publishes empirical articles of general theoretical, comparative or methodological interest to students and scholars in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and related fields. LiS aims to strengthen international scholarship and interdisciplinary conversation and cooperation among researchers interested in language and society by publishing work of high quality which speaks to a wide audience. In addition to original articles, the journal publishes reviews and notices of the latest important books in the field as well as occasional theme and discussions sections.

LiS published volume 47 in 2018. Its 2017 Impact Factor was 1.426, placing it 45 of 181 journals in the Linguistics JCR and 56 of 147 journals in the Sociology JCR (ranked by Impact Factor).

Interested applicants should send a curriculum vita and cover letter along with an abbreviated development plan (not to exceed two pages) and the names and email addresses of three referees, to Amy Laurent at Cambridge University Press (details below).

Editorial responsibilities will include:

Shaping the strategic direction of the journal, in cooperation with Cambridge

Organizing and managing the editorial office, with support from Cambridge

Early in the fall of 2016 several news agencies speculated that Donald Trump might be suffering from early onset dementia. Could this be related to his adamant monolingualism? During his campaign Donald Trump rebuked Jeb Bush for speaking Spanish, telling him to talk English, he’s in America (2015). In the campaign against Hilary Clinton, Trump dismissed bilingual communities, refusing to advertise in languages other than English. America will not be made great by making it monolingual. Monolingualism is not just a threat to national security and economic competitiveness. It’s a threat to public health.

One of the greatest weaknesses of our educational system is the decline in foreign-language education, confirmed in a recent report by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The State of Languages in the U.S. A Statistical Portrait,https://www.amacad.org/multimedia/pdfs/publications/researchpapersmonographs/State-of-Languages-in-US.pdf). The Academy’s report describes a decline in offerings of foreign language education and the widening gap between American education and the rest of the developed world. In the U.S. only a fifth of K-12 students are enrolled in languages other than English, compared to more than half of European students. Middle schools offering other languages have dropped from 75% to 58%, effectively foreclosing the possibility of advanced competency. At the same time, the benefits of dual-language immersion are substantial : by the eighth grade students in dual-language immersion programs are a full year ahead of their counterparts in English language skills. A study by researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University placed Mr. Trump’s English skills at a 5th-6th grade level, by far the lowest of any of the serious candidates from either party.

As a policy issue, the decline in foreign-language education may reflect a fundamental misconception of education’s role. The fragmentation of education represented by home schooling and the charter school movement is a means to make education confirm what students (and their parents) already believe, rather than to challenge them to understand a diverse world. Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of Education, spins this as a rejection of “one size fits all” education, but in fact it’s a rejection of very foundation of education. Self-segregation by race or religion is on the rise, while students avoid exposure to other ways of thinking, including language. Eva Moskowitz, CEO of one of the largest charter school groups (Success Academy in New York) bragged to the American Enterprise Institute about dropping foreign language education at her schools, serving, or disserving, 10,000 students in New York.

Apart from the social, economic and political consequences, monolingualism turns out to be bad for public health. Scientific evidence for a bilingual cognitive advantage has been building. Numerous studies have demonstrated that knowing two languages significantly improves transferable brain skills, an advantage psychologists call the “executive function system” of the brain. The development of this sytem, located in the prefrontal cortex, is described by Canadian psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Fergus Craik as “the most crucial cognitive achievement in early childhood”. The executive function system allows children to focus their attention, to distinguish relevant from distracting information, and to remember more accurately sequences of colors or shapes.

The scientific evidence is sometimes contested and certainly merits more, and more sophisticated, research, but it is clear that over one’s lifetime there are advantages to bilingualism. Most clearly, Bialystok and her team found that for bilinguals the onset of dementia was delayed by over four years, compared to the onset age for monolinguals. The advantages of lifelong bilingualism were confirmed in recent PhD research by Henrietta Boudros of Central Michigan University.

Computer brain games to maintain cognitive function have become a multibillion dollar industry, but the claims of the commercial applications are largely unsubstantiated. A recent review of the research concluded “the evidence larely does not support claims of broad cognitive benefits from practicing the sorts of cognitive tasks used in most brain-training software” (Simons et al 2016, 172). In short, the computer brain games make you better at playing computer brain games, but have little or no proven effect on cognition.

Instead Simons and his team found that “the development of such capacities appears to require sustained investment in relatively complex environments that afford opportunities for consistent practice and engagement with domain-related challenges” (2016, 112) – exactly the challenges that learning and maintaining a second language provide.

Instead of mocking foreign language knowledge we, as a nation, should encourage it, both in educating our children and in supporting our bilingual communities. We have done this in the past, as my book demonstrates; now more than ever it is essential that we embrace bilingualism. Denial of language education and the suppression of bilingualism is not just a threat to national security, to international economic competitiveness, but also to public health. It’s never too late to start learning another language, Mr. Trump. Maybe Russian?

Blog post based on an article in Language in Society, written by Pia Pichler and Nathanael Williams

How do we ‘authenticate’ our own identities? Can hip-hop help us in this process? If so, what might we ‘invoke’ and what are the implications for social class and various other aspects of identity?

In this article we look at the spontaneously occurring conversation of four ethnically mixed, working class young men from South London. The data recorded by these young men soon led us to appreciate the significance of hip hop talk to the authentication and identification processes within this group. We found that the data contains many phonological, grammatical, and lexical markers that are indexical of what we call Hip Hop Speech Style (HHSS). However, our data also shows how difficult it is to differentiate between HHSS and the kind of multiethnolect spoken by many young Londoners.

Our own study aims to demonstrate the value of moving the study of authenticity in relation to hip hop from a consideration of (the indexicality of) linguistic style towards a focus on discourse and ideological meanings. A limited number of studies have approached the topic of hip-hop authenticity with an analytic focus on discourses/ideologies rather than linguistic style and even fewer studies have investigated what we might call ‘third sphere’ of hip hop, that is, interaction among Hip Hop fans and activists.

In our analysis we focus on terms and expressions that not only index, or, in other words ‘invoke’ or ‘point to’ various aspects of hip-hop culture, but that also need to be understood in relation to wider macro-sociological concepts. These cultural concepts in turn ‘index’ or ‘invoke’ unconscious sociocultural knowledge and allow speakers to position themselves in relation to these concepts and to one another. This often indirect relationship between linguistic forms and social meaning, and between different levels of indexicality, is at the core of indexicality studies.

Thus, when the young men talk about ‘white girls from The Hills’, or ‘hipsters moving into the hood’, or, in reference to the local gang, ‘dhem man will spray the matic out da Porsche’, they not only evaluate the authenticity of their own and others’ identity performances in relation to hip-hop culture, but hip-hop culture in itself is presented as indexical of various aspects of larger-scale practices and structures.

The speakers position ‘white posh girls from The Hills’, ‘hipsters moving into the hood’, ‘white boys from Cambridge’, as well as the pop star Miley Cyrus in opposition to hip-hop culture. What is interesting is that many of these individuals take part in cultural practices that in themselves index allegiance with hip-hop or street culture, for example, by producing World Star Hip Hop videos, by moving to or living in the hood or in rough London estates, by having extensive knowledge about hip hop, or by ‘twerking like a mutha *****’. These attempts to index hip-hop or street authenticity, however, are not accepted by the group.